


The Beaten & the Damned

by JazzRaft



Series: The Pious and the Profane [5]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Implied NoctNyx, Implied Relationships, Omen!Luna, Oracle!Noctis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-14
Updated: 2017-03-03
Packaged: 2018-09-24 05:18:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9705035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JazzRaft/pseuds/JazzRaft
Summary: The Chosen Queen has fallen from Ascension. In a desperate, final effort, Noctis tries to pull the girl he used to know from the darkness.





	1. Fallen from Grace

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on [tumblr](http://jazzraft.tumblr.com/post/156249199807/okay-i-had-to-when-i-saw-those-prompts-if-youre) for #31 in [this prompt post.](http://jazzraft.tumblr.com/post/156180067603/send-me-two-characters-or-more-and-a-prompt-and)

“Where are your gods now?”

The fact that he couldn’t answer that hurt almost more than the heel of her boot in his stomach. Luna stood over him, eyes red and daemonic, consumed by the darkness he’d tried so hard to deliver her from. She crouched over him, those horrible eyes looking pityingly down at him.

“They’ve failed you, Noctis. They’ve failed us both. Just like they always have.”

Noctis swallowed hard on the dark, secret part of him that desperately wanted to know she was right. But then he saw what the darkness had done to her, and everything he’d been raised to know in his life told him that, no matter if she was right, all of this was wrong.

“Maybe that’s true,” he said, voice thick with smoke and blood and his failures. “Maybe they broke us, but they’re also the only ones who can save us.”

Her fist met his jaw, a sickening snap of white flashing in the back of his skull as his head hit the ground. Through the haze in his eyes, he saw the Trident of the Oracle, dropped just beyond his reach. He tried dragging himself to it, but it slipped from beneath his fingers, falling into the hands of the corrupted Queen of Light.

“You’re as foolish now as you were when we were children,” she said, each word dripping like poison from her lips. “You’re being used, Noctis. The both of us were. I can still free you from your fate.”

“I’m not the one who’s trapped, Luna.”

Her lip curled into a snarl and she paced around him, twirling the shaft of his trident in her hands. Noctis searched the black horizon, writhing with daemons all across the wasteland. He didn’t have the power to summon the gods to save him. They’d failed to make their Covenants with Luna and were slain in the process. Whether by Niflheim’s hand or by Luna herself, the heavens were empty. If Bahamut was still there, he’d turned his face from Eos. No help was coming for Noctis.

“You want to live, don’t you, Noct?”

He stiffened, forcing himself not to look at her, lest his eyes betray any denial he might make. There was something in the way she said it though, a preternatural knowledge of moments she shouldn’t know, that gave him the impression he couldn’t deny her.

“You want to be with him, don’t you? Your knight in shining armor? It’s alright, you don’t have to deny it. It’s not as if our marriage was arranged out of mutual adoration for each other.”

Noctis gulped down on the taste of blood her words welled up in him. Once, he had truly loved her. Enough to look forward to spending his life with her. It may have been made under the pretense of political obligation, but he’d thought that it could be real. He’d hoped that maybe she loved him back, enough to make it work.

That was long before this though. That was before Nyx and Altissia and his final failure with Leviathan. That was before the stolen moments in the Grand Palace towers, waiting without hope for a light that was never coming. That was before coveting kisses that made him feel like anything he did had some sort of worth. That was all before the darkness came, not so long ago, but an eternity.

“I know it’s what you desire the most,” Luna said, crouching back down beside him, her voice as soft as the folds of midnight. “And it’s okay. To want. I was told my whole life that I couldn’t want anything that wasn’t already being given to me. But the shadows showed me otherwise. I wanted the power to make my life my own, not my mother’s, not my kingdom’s, not anyone’s. And the darkness gave that to me. That and so much more.”

She extended a hand to him, the daemonic taint of the Scourge coursing strong through her veins where it was slowly corroding inside of him. The shadows seeped from the pores of her skin, twining around her fingers, the power fitting her like a glove. She smiled at him, child-like and almost resembling the girl he’d adored so many years ago.

“It’ll be so easy,” she assured him in an urgent whisper. “You can have all of it. Your life, your knight, _me_ …”

Noctis reached out to touch her hand, the darkness shivering over his skin, empty and cold. He called on the familiar feeling that had been his aid for all his life, probing the unseen powers that governed the universe for a sign that it was still there. Small, sputtering sparks of light emerged from his fingertips, sending the darkness coiling back within Luna.

“I want the light.”

“Then you want nothing.”

She tore her hand from his and crushed him to the ground beneath her boot. The prongs of the trident pricked at his throat. There had to be hope, he told himself. There wouldn’t be light if there was no hope. The gods, wherever they might be, must not have forsaken them completely. The Queen of Light may have fallen, the Oracle may have failed, but there must have been salvation somewhere. A tiny finger of light, just waiting to burst through the shadows.

He searched for it one last time in Luna’s dispassionate gaze, frantically cloying for a way to save her. “It’s not too late, Luna. The darkness is a disease, but I can heal you of it. I’ll take it all away, I’ll die if I have to, please…”

“You’re going to die anyway,” she said, as cold as the death she promised. “I know what I want and now I have it. You are right about one thing though. It’s not too late. I’ll give you one last chance. Please just take it.”

She said it like he was exasperating her, but Noctis thought he saw a true sadness flicker blue in the red of her irises. The faintest glimmer of sympathy, of nostalgia for the innocence of their youth, of wishing he would share in the corruption with her like he’d shared in the purity from the past. Maybe that tiny, infinitesimal touch of _something_ inside her was the light Noctis knew was still there in the world. He prayed to any gods left who may be listening that it was.

He smiled at her, tears spilling from his eyes, and shook his head. Luna sighed, lowering her head, and the trident pressed down.


	2. Raised From Perdition

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Knights to the rescue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted on [tumblr](http://jazzraft.tumblr.com/post/156814056037/hiya-if-youre-not-tired-of-this-au-yet-how) for #43 in [this prompt post.](http://jazzraft.tumblr.com/post/156511645930/send-me-a-pairing-and-a-number-and-ill-write-you)

“YOU DID WHAT?!”

“So I punched the harbinger of darkness in the teeth. What, like you didn’t want to?”

Imagining a scenario where he could get a jump on the fallen queen enough to punt her halfway across Eos was one thing; succeeding at it in actuality was entirely another. It wasn’t so much outrage that Nyx felt at Aranea’s reckless rescue endeavor so much as it was envy. That she got to enact what he’d been dreaming of doing since the day Luna had turned on them.

He had no idea how Aranea knew where Noctis was – although he was starting to suspect his tracking device theory might have more merit than he originally gave it credit for. He had no idea how the Oracle’s Sworn Sword to Nyx’s Sworn Shield had managed to pilot her crimson ship through the scourged sky and drop herself into a flaming hellscape of daemons just in time to disarm the corrupted princess and send her wheeling back onto the blackened earth.

Three red pinpricks still bled on Noctis’s neck, mocking Nyx as he tended to his unconscious lord’s wounds. As much as he envied Aranea her victory, there was not enough gratitude in the world to thank her for saving the Oracle’s life.

Aranea had moved so fast. Faster than even Nyx was trained to keep up with. One second she’d been snapping at him that they were “totally fine, this ship ain’t afraid of the dark;” the next, she cut off some jab about his romance with Noctis and threw the airship controls at him. He’d cursed and scrambled into the pilot’s seat, shouting back at her as she bolted towards the opening doors at the back of the ship and his cries going unheard as the winds sucked Aranea out into open air.

Nyx set the ship to hover idly over where Aranea had vanished, leaning over the console to search the billowing smoke beneath him. A tiny parting in the black clouds awarded him a brief view of his sister-in-arms lunging at a thrown back Luna and the red-eyed daemon rolling clear of her lance before becoming obscure again. Nyx raced back to the open doors, coughing on the smoke and waiting for another opening so that he could lend Aranea his daggers.

The Dragoon ascended from darkness, nearly colliding with Nyx as she alighted inside the ship with the Oracle draped across her shoulders.

“We’ve gotta go,” she said, all of the scathing humor in her voice extinguished as she dropped Noctis into his arms and hauled herself back into the pilot’s seat, gunning the engine and flying clear of the roiling mass of daemons below.

The ship was cruising calmly back towards Lestallum, with Biggs and Wedge at the helm while the captain and her cohort tended to their charge in the medical bay. Aranea finished relaying events with a summary of “got enough hits in to remind her of who she has to go through to get to him.”

Nyx returned his attention to Noctis, running the damp rag across his face. Neither he nor Aranea were experts in the medical field, relying more on potions than surgeons to get them back on their feet, but they’d learned enough in the event of an emergency such as this to abstain the injuries long enough before they reached someone that could more effectively treat them. They’d bandaged Noctis up and helped his limp body out of the bloody Oracle robes and into whatever fatigues Aranea had on board.

Their liege lord slept restlessly, upon the cot, an expression of discontent on his slumbering face. Brow creased, lips parted to murmur unintelligible prayers at gods that weren’t there to listen, dampness gathering beneath his lashes. Nyx gently washed them away.

“I’ll go get an ETA on Lestallum,” Aranea said into the ambient silence.

For all her brash encouragements of displaying unconcealed affection for one another, Aranea – while she would never, _ever_ admit it – was sensitive enough to allow the two their intimate moments without pressing her face to the glass. Before she left, Nyx called her to a stop. He searched for the words on the floor of the room, knowing they weren’t going to be good enough, but needing to say them anyway.

“Thank you.”

He met her eyes, as green and treacherous as a malboro’s tentacles. They could be as corrosive as acid, sizzling beneath your skin to burn out your weaknesses and use them to make you hers. Nyx had distrusted her from the first day Noctis hired her, against all of his advice to the contrary. She sold her services to the highest bidder. Today she served the Oracle, tomorrow she sold them out to the Empire. Not to mention she was a _horrible_ influence on the king-to-be.

Noctis’s innocence was warped in a week flat beneath Aranea’s tutelage. She taught him how to wield his trident like a true blade and not just a “stick to defend yourself with.” She taught him to punch, she taught him to curse, and – most dangerously – she taught him to _flirt_ with Nyx; a broad, deliberate step in her crusade to push the two boys together. Nyx had objected to all of her methods because it was his job to do so, but he secretly admired her forward brutality. Especially when it spared Noctis’s life.

Presently, Aranea smiled at him, trying to pass it off as smug, but Nyx had worked with her long enough to be able to tell the difference between when she was pretending and when she really meant it.

“All part of the job, ain’t it?”

It was more than that and they both knew it, but Nyx didn’t press it. Didn’t force her to open up her chest and show him her heart for once. Gods forbid he was ever allowed to know she had one. That thought made him smile before a sound from Noctis pulled his attention. The Oracle’s eyelids twitched and his lips pressed together, a soft whimper of confusion sounding in his throat as he opened his eyes.

Aranea marched back to his bedside as Nyx coaxed him awake, murmuring words of assurance that he was safe. Noctis’s eyes were red and cloudy, the effect of the fires and the pain of his injuries making them nearly colorless. He glanced at his two knights, Nyx crouched at his side, fingers laced through his own, and Aranea behind him, arms crossed and smirking.

“Took you long enough,” she teased. “Do you think the world’s gonna save itself while you snooze?”

Nyx elbowed her knee as confusion spread through Noctis’s gaze. His eyes traveled slowly between Nyx and Aranea. He opened his mouth to speak, but couldn’t form words at first. He coughed slightly, and when he did speak, his words were halting and there was gravel in his voice.

“Both of you… you came? Together?”

Nyx glanced back at Aranea, catching her moving her eyes from his just as he did. While Aranea had been pressing Nyx and Noctis together as lovers, Noctis had desperately been trying to push Aranea and Nyx together as comrades. All of his attempts had failed, the two of them just barely coexisting for the sake of their retainer. It took his near-death for the two of them to stop fighting and start working together.

Nyx squeezed his hands and gave him a sobering smile, feeling Aranea drift a few steps away to distance herself from the threat of showing emotion.

“It seems that healing people isn’t the only miracle you can work.”


End file.
